The View From Everywhere

Cubism From Duchamp to Hemingway

When Marcel Duchamp completed his painting Nude Descending a Staircase, the Parisian art world didn’t know what to make of it. The title tells us we are looking at a nude, but which part is the nude, exactly?

There isn’t a single point. The nude sprawls across the canvas, made up of geometric shapes laid over themselves several times to create a sense of movement. In each “frame” the nude has turned slightly, so we see them from different angles at the same time. Since our gaze has nothing to rest upon, it naturally follows the direction of movement, from top-left to bottom-right, aided by motion lines around the legs and hips.

X. J. Kennedy wrote a rather clever poem in response to the painting:

Toe upon toe, a snowing flesh,
A gold of lemon, root and rind,
She sifts in sunlight down the stairs
With nothing on. Nor on her mind.

We spy beneath the banister
A constant thresh of thigh on thigh--
Her lips imprint the swinging air
That parts to let her parts go by.

One-woman waterfall, she wears
Her slow descent like a long cape
And pausing, on the final stair
Collects her motions into shape.

The most glittering phrases in this poem evoke the softness of the naked human body: “a snowing flesh, a gold of lemon. . .” The nude doesn’t move, she “sifts”, as if lacking firmness. Her movements are worn like a long cape. When she stops at the bottom step, she “collects her motions into shape”, as if, her descent having captured our attention, time has stopped, and our mind lingers a few seconds behind where she is actually standing.

Duchamp’s nude is made up of blocky shapes and is quite murky in colour.¹ It has a jaggedness about it that is missing in the poem. It looks more like a metallic creature than a human being.

Kennedy’s nude is described with a lot of naturalistic imagery from a very male gaze. She is like an Arcadian fantasy: a waterfall moving in sunlight, her thighs thresh, as if cutting wheat. The poem savours the sight of her, like you might sniff the bouquet of a wine in the anticipation of getting to gobble it all up.

That's not the only difference. The painting’s French title, Nu descendant un escalier no. 2, implies that the subject is a man, because it uses the masculine Nu. The title of the poem is both a hint and a frustration: contemporary viewers were annoyed because, try as they might, they couldn’t point to any particular part of the painting and say: “That’s him.” While there is a figure in the painting, it has been decomposed into lots of parts which have little meaning when considered individually. You have to look at the entire painting to “see” the nude.

The fact that this painting “contained” a naked body was controversial. Nudes were a popular subject in French painting, but one did not simply paint a nude walking down the stairs. That was too trivial. A nude had to show the proportions and grace and delicacy of the human body. What Duchamp painted was not soft and pleasant and vulnerable, but hard and dynamic and kinetic. It is graceful not because of its shape or colour, but because of its motion. It is a painting not so much of the nude, but of his descent.

Despite being rejected by the cubists, Nude Descending a Staircase is definitely a cubist work. The subject has been decomposed into geometric objects and painted from multiple perspectives at the same time. The outlines are hard. The colours are muted.

Cubism contrasts with the impressionist style that was dominant in France before it. The impressionists liked to suggest form with lots of little strokes of dazzling colour. They painted objects with blurry outlines in wide, open, lush scenes. By contrast, Nude Descending a Staircase is close and claustrophobic, with the nude’s movements nearly filling up the entire canvas.

In their essay Cubism, Albert Glezies and Jean Metzinger wrote something of a summary and something of a manifesto of the cubist movement. Much of what they were doing was a revolt against the impressionists:

The art of the Impressionists involves an absurdity: by diversity of color it tries to create life, yet its drawing is feeble and worthless. A dress shimmers, marvelous; forms disappear, atrophied… the retina predominates over the brain; they were aware of this and, to justify themselves, gave credit to the incompatibility of the intellectual faculties and artistic feeling.

The bright colours and open scenes of the impressionists are enchanting to look at. But there was an indulgence to them. They short-circuited the mind and appealed directly to the senses.

The cubists wanted to excite the mind as well as the senses. They wanted paintings with movement and energy, which appealed to motor sensations just as much as tactile feelings. And they wanted to speak to those abstract categories of thought which help us understand paintings.

We approach any piece of art with some assumptions about how it presents itself. We assume that the subject of a painting is, in some way, connected with its title. We assume the strokes in a painting will look like or represent the subject in some way. And we have broader cultural assumptions: most people, on seeing Nude Descending a Staircase for the first time, assume the nude is a woman—perhaps because nudes in paintings are generally women, but I also think the nude is shaped a bit like a dress.

The cubists played with these assumptions. They liked to paint in a non-naturalistic way, with a grimey palette of colours. They used the title of the painting as a way to plant in your mind the idea necessary to understand it. How do you know how to interpret the movement and the blocky figures in Duchamp’s painting? Because it’s called Nude Descending a Staircase. Knowing that helps us see the overlapping figures as a single moving person.

Glezies and Metzinger wrote: “To the eyes of most people the external world is amorphous. To discern a form is to verify it by a pre-existing idea…” (6). These pre-existing ideas, which conduct our perceptions of a thing, can also distort the truth of it.

Take a pair of railway lines. As they stretch into the distance, they seem to get closer:

We know they are not actually getting closer. We can confirm this by moving along and around the tracks, looking at them from different angles, and building up an image of the tracks in our mind. But if we only saw the tracks from a single perspective—and lacked the ideas of geometry or optics—we might think the tracks are getting closer together.

The cubists wanted to free us from the limitations of single perspective. They painted things from multiple perspectives simultaneously; hence in Nude Descending a Staircase, each frame of the nude is turned slightly. We don’t just see the nude, but the descending.

In the below detail from Violin and Palette by Georges Braques, we see a violin from two sides simultaneously. We can see the strings, which are only visible from the front, but also a profile of the curled wood at the tail of the violin, near the top of the painting, which would only be visible when looking at it from the side:

To understand the shape and look of a violin, it wouldn’t suffice to view it from only one angle. You have to pick it up and turn it around in your hands and look at it from multiple sides. Painting in multiple perspective implies this kind of movement: we are invited to turn the objects around in our minds, or to move around the scene.

Cubist ideas weren’t just confined to painting. In Paris the poet Gertrude Stein, a close friend to many important cubist painters, brought them into her writing. Her poems are very abstract and resist literal understanding. Like Duchamp’s paintings, they defy anyone who points to a particular part to say “there it is.”

Stein’s poems move on the sonic qualities and relations between the words in the poem. For this to happen, she had to eliminate any associations the words came pre-loaded with. Her most famous example is from Sacred Emily: “a rose is a rose is a rose”.

Think of a rose. What do you see? What do you think about? Probably a flower with deep red petals and a green stalk. You are probably also thinking about love or romance. If you see a rose on Valentines Day or in a cartoon you might even skip “seeing” the flower and jump straight to thinking about its romantic connotations. All these associations are going to colour how you understand a rose in a poem.

Stein wanted to empty the words in her poems of these staid associations. She thought they stood in the way of our grasping the subject. Her incantatory line “a rose is a rose is a rose” tries to push through our reflex assumptions about what the word “rose” means. Only then we can begin to think of a rose afresh.

Stein wasn’t the only writer with a cubist tinge. A young Ernest Hemingway fell in with her crowd in Paris. His early short-story collections, In Our Time and Men Without Women, use quick repetition of simple, declarative sentences to achieve a kind of multiple perspective. The collections themselves are like cubist paintings: the stories, told out-of-order, are fragmentary pieces that build up a picture of the action and turbulence of World War I, as detailed by the traumas lingering in those who experienced it.

At the end of World War I the Ottoman Empire was prised apart in the Treaty of Sevres. Turkey declared itself an independent nation and fought Greece for several years for key parts of the former empire. Mass population transfers and atrocities were committed by both sides.

This is the backdrop for the short-story On the Quai at Smyrna. The narrator is a soldier who has been brought in to help keep order at Smyrna, where refugees are being evacuated by ship:

The worst, he said, were the women with dead babies. You couldn't get the women to give up their dead babies. They'd have babies dead for six days. Wouldn't give them up. Nothing you could do about it.

The repetition of “dead babies” empties the words of their sting. Like “a rose is a rose is a rose”, you begin to desensitise to them. This heightens the sorrow of the scene: we become like the narrator who, lacking the means to understand the suffering mothers, has consigned himself to business-as-usual. “Wouldn’t give them up. Nothing you can do about it.”

In Big Two Heated River, Nick Adams has come back from the war, but struggles to adapt to a normal life again. So he goes camping. But there is something wrong with him: he has some kind of trauma from his war experience. Hemingway never tells us this. He only conveys it indirectly, such as this scene where Nick sets up his tent:

Inside the tent the light came through the brown canvas. It smelled pleasantly of canvas. Already there was something mysterious and homelike. Nick was happy as he crawled inside the tent. He had not been unhappy all day. This was different though. Now things were done. There had been this to do. Now it was done. It had been a hard trip. He was very tired. That was done. He had made his camp. He was settled. Nothing could touch him. It was a good place to camp. He was there, in the good place. He was in his home where he had made it. Now he was hungry.

Nick is trying to assure himself. He keeps re-casting the events of the day in a different light, hoping to convince himself that the war is over and now he can get on with his life. But in having to repeatedly convince himself, he is only prolonging things and drawing attention to the fact that it is not done. The war is not over, and what Nick saw will stay with him for the rest of his life.

In Another Country is about an unnamed American soldier who is recovering from his injuries in a Milan hospital. Here’s how Hemingway sets the scene:

In the fall the war was always there, but we did not go to it any more. It was cold in the fall in Milan and the dark came very early. Then the electric lights came on, and it was pleasant along the streets looking in the windows. There was much game hanging outside the shops, and the snow powdered in the fur of the foxes and the wind blew their tails. The deer hung stiff and heavy and empty, and small birds blew in the wind and the wind turned their feathers. It was a cold fall and the wind came down from the mountains.

Even though we’re not explicitly told so, the seasons are changing and Fall is beginning. We know this from the focus on the falling snow, the days getting shorter, and the wind blowing down from the mountains.

Then Hemingway describes the city, showing the same thing from different perspectives. In some cases he zooms in on a specific detail, in others he steps to one side to show it from another angle. So we first see the game hanging outside the shops. Then we zoom in on the snow powdered in the fur of the foxes. Then we shift perspective, and the wind is blowing their tails.

“Small birds blew in the wind and the wind turned their feathers”. In the first half of this sentence, we see the image from the bird’s perspective: the bird flies into the wind. The second half of the sentence pivots to look at this from the opposite side: the wind blows into the birds and turns and ruffles their feathers. The repetition is like a spiral that zooms in on the same image to emphasise a different part. As our mind’s eye jumps back and forth between the animal pelts, the streets, and the birds, we get a scattered sense of movement—just like the wind that is sweeping through the city.

Cubism cut a wide path through the arts. They wanted art with a sense of movement, art which spoke to the mind. They tried to bring that into their paintings with multiple perspective. By overcoming the limitations of single perspective, they sought the view from everywhere—be it of the one-woman waterfall of the nude descending the staircase, the smell of a rose without cheap sentiment, or the birds whose feathers are ruffled by the icy Autumn winds of Milan.

1. There are several versions of Nude Descending a Staircase. Each has different colours, but they are all quite murky.